Uncertainty surrounds whether Russia’s spring offensive has begun in eastern Ukraine

“Meat grinder” assaults.

That was the stark phrase used by Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, to characterize Russian tactics on parts of the 1,200km front in mid-March.

From Tuesday, 17 March through Friday, 20 March, Russian troops carried out more than 600 assault operations across the entire frontline, General Syrskyi said this week in a post on the Facebook page of Ukraine’s armed forces.

He said those attacks left Russia with more than 6,000 casualties in only four days.

Ukrainian and Western military agencies estimate that Russia is losing about 7,000 troops, killed and wounded, every week on average.

Throughout the war, commanders and analysts have repeatedly described the frontline in Ukraine as “a meat grinder,” shorthand for Russia’s practice of sending successive waves of troops at entrenched Ukrainian positions.

Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi described Russian tactics as ‘meat grinder’ assaults (file image)

The late Wagner Mercenary Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin used similar language in early 2023, branding his forces’ brutal push against Ukrainian defenders in Bakhmut as “Operation Bakhmut Meatgrinder.”

Russia ultimately captured the ruins of the city in April 2023, but only after thousands of Russian troops were killed.

Chance of small infantry unit going unnoticed in ‘kill zone’ slim

As the conflict has dragged on, the growing dominance of increasingly lethal drones has made such assaults even more costly and far less effective.

Within the “kill zone” — an area stretching as far as 20km from the frontline and watched by surveillance and attack drones from both sides — the odds of a small infantry unit moving unseen are low.

Once detected, its prospects for survival are lower still.

Estimates from Ukrainian and Western sources differ, but most indicate that roughly 70% of Russian combat losses along the 1,200km front are caused by Ukrainian drones.

Ukrainian troops, for their part, are subjected to the same relentless threat from Russian attack drones.

A destroyed Russian main battle tank stands on display in Odesa, Ukraine

Still, last week’s Russian assaults along the line of contact, and the unusually high toll in killed and wounded, pointed to a possible return by Moscow’s commanders — perhaps only temporarily — to pushing larger numbers of troops into the “meat grinder” in an effort to inch westward metre by metre.

If this marked the opening phase of a Russian ground offensive, it fell flat.

General Syrskyi said Ukrainian forces turned back the attacks across the front.

Even so, Russia’s leadership may be preparing further “meat grinder assaults” despite the extraordinary scale of its battlefield losses.

Russian forces conducting mechanised assaults on frontline – report

A report published this week by the Institute of the Study of War (ISW), a US-based research institute that tracks the fine detail of combat in Ukraine, said Russian forces are increasingly carrying out mechanised assaults on the frontline, “possibly as part of intensified preparation for their spring-summer 2026 offensive”.

The mechanised units involved in the mid-March attacks were smaller than a standard Russian mechanised company, which normally consists of no more than 40 troops.

The ISW report said: “Some of these mechanised assaults may have been Russian reconnaissance-in-force missions that aim to probe, identify, or test Ukrainian positions ahead of future ground assaults in the spring-summer campaign”.

By that reading, the four-day Russian push in mid-March looks less like a full offensive than an expensive probing operation.

ISW also pointed to other signs that Russian forces may be laying the groundwork for a spring or summer campaign. Among them are the shelling of settlements near Kramatorsk and strikes on dams near Kostyantynivka and toward Pokrovsk since late February.

According to ISW, those actions are likely intended to “interrupt Ukrainian logistics and flood Ukrainian positions”.

People stand near a damaged Bernardine church and monastery after a Russian drone attack on Lviv, Ukraine

Even so, Russia mounted similar large-scale attacks along the frontline at roughly the same point last year.

Yet over the course of 2025, Russia seized less than 1% of Ukrainian territory.

So, has Russia begun a spring offensive in eastern Ukraine?

The answer is no — not yet. Moscow may instead be holding back until early summer to launch a broader campaign against Ukrainian defensive lines in Donetsk’s so-called Fortress Belt, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded as the price for ending the war.

But with Ukrainian drones enforcing a vast “kill zone,” the prospects of any major breakthrough from Russia’s current positions remain slim.

A Ukrainian serviceman of the 18th Sloviansk Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine participates in training

The last major counteroffensive or significant advance in the war came in the autumn of 2022, when Ukrainian forces liberated occupied parts of Kharkiv region and large areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, including Kherson city.

Since then, the war has settled into attrition.

More troubling for Ukraine was the sheer scale of Russian drone strikes across the country last Tuesday — nearly 1,000 in total across 11 Ukrainian regions, including attacks on Lviv’s historic quarter, around 900km from the frontline in Donetsk.

Why or how Lviv’s 16th century Bernadine monastery was considered a target of strategic value by Russian forces is unclear. Moscow’s war is fought on several fronts, including a psychological one.

And with the US war against Iran entering its fifth week, Russia appears more willing to test massive drone barrages on a scale not previously seen.

In that sense, mass drone attacks hitting every corner of Ukraine may amount to a new form of offensive by Moscow, one aimed at slowly pushing the US-peace initiative into the background.

But a winter-long bombing campaign against civilian and energy infrastructure failed to break Ukrainian resolve, and there is little to suggest it will do so in the months ahead.